Re: [Tile-dev] Questions about new theme development...

[Georgios P. <pe...@ii...>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joe English" <jen...@fl...>
To: <tkt...@li...>
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 3:00 AM
Subject: Re: [Tile-dev] Questions about new theme development...


>
> George Petasis wrote:
>
>> I have made some first steps into building a new tile theme
>> (see http://www.iit.demokritos.gr/~petasis/screenshot.png [...]
>
> Once again: wow!
>
>> but I am having some problems on how
>> to implement some widget elements.
>>
>> First of all, for changing the background of the text label
>> of a labelframe, I have to reimplement the Labelframe.text
>> element. And of course I don't want to mess up with text at all.
>> But why this widget element has a special background?
>> I have implemented a generic "background" element, and seems
>> to be used by all widgets, except from the labelframe with its
>> text. Is there a solution for this?
>
> The "Labelframe.text" element defined in tkElements.c
> is exactly the same as the default "text" element except
> that it erases the background area first.  If you can
> find some way to extract KDE's background color and get
> that into a Tcl script, you should be able to use the
> built-in Labelframe.text element and do something like:
>
>    style default Labelframe -background [kde::backgroundColor]
>
> in the theme definition.

Of course something I haven't thought of :-) However,
it still doesn't solve all the problems, as the Qt style may
use a pixmap for the background. I think a better solution
is to export a function that will handle text drawing?
(Perhaps it will be needed by other themes).
Or since labelframe is the only widget that needs to draw
a backround, break its text element in two subelements,
a background & a text?

>
>
>> The second important problem that I have is theming the scrollbar
>> widget. In my theme, I take the current unix KDE/Qt theme that the
>> desktop uses, and draw the widgets. But at this point, I don't know
>> what the organisation of the scrollbar will be. I.e. in the above
>> screenshot the scrollbar seems fine (visually), but the elements that
>> comprise it are not in place, as I use the default layout for scrollbars.
>> On the other hand, Qt has 6 (!) scrollbar elements, but no layout
>> information
>> at all. Any theme that has override the style.drawComplexControl()
>> may have placed the various pieces in various places.
>
>
> The Aqua theme on Mac OSX has the exact same problem --
> instead of entry points to draw each piece of a scrollbar,
> there's a DrawThemeTrack() function that draws the whole
> thing.  I don't know how to solve the problem there, either :-(.

Well Qt does the exact same thing for almost all widgets :-)
Check/Radio buttons, comboboxes, scrollbars, etc.
Thus, in my code I have made some assumptions, i.e. that the
combobox arrow will always be on the right side of the widget.
If a Qt style comes out that changes that, comboboxes will be
as problematic as scrollbars :-)

>
> It will almost certainly require a change to the theme engine
> and scrollbar widget internals to handle this correctly;
> we need to add another level of indirection (somewhere)
> to support this sort of thing.
>
> Is your source code available?
>

Yes and no :-) No in the sense that you can't
download them from anywhere. But for anybody feeling
adventurus, running linux/KDE 3.x, and willing to
change somewhat the makefile for some hardcoded
Qt/KDE include/lib paths, I can email directly
a gzipped tarball. In any case, and despite the level
I will finally manage to achieve writting this theme,
I will post my sources somewhere (i.e. in the tile SF patch area?),
as perhaps they will be also usefull to others (and always
under BSD). In any case, do you want to send you a copy of
my sources? I haven't managed to theme all widgets,
only buttons* & combobox...
And even for these widgets, some alignment problems still
remain when background pixmaps are used, which I am not sure
if they can be resolved under tile. I have to somehow allign the
background pixmap tile, and I need to know the position of the
window in its toplevel. I have the tkwin for each element, but still
haven't looked into this at all :-)

George